Opening up a student store on your school's campus can help promote positive behavior for all students. This post will explain how I opened and continue to facilitate a student store through our Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports program and student leadership.
I serve as the Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) Coach for my school site. As a PBIS school, we use positive reinforcement to teach children about and reinforce our behavior expectations.
At my school site, we are the Bridgeport Dolphins and our slogan is "Be Your B.E.S.T."
B-Be Respectful
E-Encourage Kindness
S-Safety First
T-Try Your Hardest
Here's a look at our school-wide behavior matrix.
One way we reinforce our behavior expectations is by acknowledging students with a positive behavior ticket when they're following all behavior expectations. We call them "B.E.S.T. Tickets."
Originally, students enjoyed earning these tickets because they were eligible to then turn their tickets into a school-wide raffle. They could enter as many tickets as they wanted. Each Friday we held a raffle and announced winners from grades K through 6th grade.
This incentive was working for a while, but our PBIS team noticed that our upper-grade students weren't as interested in the raffle as our primary students. We decided we needed to do something a little bit bigger, and something that was more immediate and gratifying.
We decided that the solution was to implement a student store! After a little bit of trial and error, we developed a system that worked really well for our school site that I'd like to share with you! Here's how you can create a student store for your students.
Order Forms and Distribution
We originally would visit each classroom and bring the student store "on wheels" to students. Students would then use their B.E.S.T. Tickets to purchase items based on the displayed prices. This took a lot of time, and we weren't always able to reach every single classroom within one day. Because of this struggle, we decided to implement an order form system.
Students use the order form to check off the items they want to purchase. Then, they staple or paper clip all of their B.E.S.T. Tickets to the order form and place it all in a bin at the front office counter. When we first implemented this system, our PBIS team and administrators delivered the prizes to the students. It was hard to find times to get all of the order forms delivered, so we came up with yet another idea; A B.E.S.T. Student Leadership Team.
This team is comprised of students who are on our Kids in School Service (KISS) team. They help deliver the prizes to the students who have turned in order forms. They use this cart and deliver during the recess and lunch recess times. We used these bins to load the items onto our cart.
The best part is that they take the cart to our kindergarten classrooms and help the kindergarteners purchase items from the cart. It's the cutest thing EVER!
Storage and Display
We display some of our prizes in a glass case right outside our front office. We put the prices next to the items. Our goal for this display is to get the students excited about purchasing items using their B.E.S.T. tickets. We'll often times put our new items on display so students can see things that may not be on the order form. We actually developed a new order form with a blank space, so when students see the new items they can just write in what they want along with the price of tickets.
We keep all student store items in our administrators' offices. This is convenient for our B.E.S.T. Student Leadership Team because they can just go into the office and restock the cart.
Desirable Items
Our students are always so eager to purchase some cute and usable items from our student store. We take requests and suggestions from students and we also listen to our B.E.S.T. Student Leadership Team about trending items! Some of the most popular prizes have been the notebooks with pens, Marvel stickers, Be You notepads, and the bendable sloths!
Communication
We had our B.E.S.T. Student Leadership Team make a video to show our student body and staff members how students could order from our student store. We also have a bulletin board displayed with directions on how to order items from the store.
Our B.E.S.T. Student Leadership team does a phenomenal job letting me know when we're low on items, when students haven't turned in enough tickets, or when we need to add more desirable or requested items like the mini erasers, positive pins, and emoji key chains.
Through our B.E.S.T. Student Leadership team, bulletin board set up, and use of positive behavior tickets, we've seen a big increase in positive student behavior, as well as students being more motivated to earn our B.E.S.T. tickets. Implementing this system has definitely been a game-changer for our school.
